HP sets out future strategy
Vendor hints that it has IBM in its sights
Newly-weds Hewlett Packard (HP) and Compaq unveiled their new UK and Ireland management team last week, and claimed that the indirect versus direct debate is now redundant.
The new company also dropped its strongest hint that it has IBM in its sights in the services space.
Jim Kent, general manager for HP services, said that the company is now the "only real alternative to IBM". HP claimed that it has been catapulted to third place in the services arena, thanks to the merger.
Andy Isherwood, general manager of the joint HP Enterprise Systems Group, said: "The route to market is all about customer choice, not a debate about direct versus indirect."
But he conceded that there is an onus on HP to "understand accounts better than it does today". The key to winning channel mind share, he said, is to "be consistent and build trust over time".
Speaking about the shift to deliver IT "like water from a tap or gas from a pipe" Stephen Gill, general manager of HP UK and Ireland, said: "The old-world hardware paradigm has changed for ever."
Today's IT is all about digital content delivered, as some have described it, like a Martini: anytime, anywhere.
Infrastructure is critical to this scenario, said Gill, and service delivery will be the "critical part that glues together the solutions for our customers".
But Mike Norris, chief executive at reseller Computacenter, maintained that HP has some catching up to do to compete with IBM's services offerings.
"As a company, HP stacks up as good as any to IBM, but it does not yet have the volume or depth," he said. "But this doesn't mean that it won't in the future."
Norris told vnunet.com's sister publication Computer Reseller News that he was happy with the way the merger had gone, and that the new company had reason to be pretty confident. "It's big stuff and it involves a lot of change," he said.
Norris added that Computacenter was actively looking at how it will meet the needs of the combined HP/Compaq.